


Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's Chest

by GraceEliz



Category: National Theatre, Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: Based off the National Theatre production, F/M, Female Jim Hawkins, John Silver's dubious morality, Mildly Possessive Behaviour, National Theatre - Freeform, Pirates, You Know Who You Are Target Audience. You Know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23811301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GraceEliz/pseuds/GraceEliz
Summary: The first time she sees Silver he comes sliding out of the galley depths behind her whilst she’s distracted by the talking parrot, so her first sight is actually of him in the light, with a stool in one hand, a knife in the other.The last time she sees Silver he is following Ben the ghost-boy through the tunnel maze, but she hears him scream.
Relationships: Jim Hawkins & Ben Gunn, Jim Hawkins & John Silver, Jim Hawkins/John Silver
Comments: 23
Kudos: 37





	Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's Chest

**Author's Note:**

> I DID IT. only took a week but I'm here.  
> Based on the 2015 National Theatre version of Treasure Island.   
> Is Jim nb? I have zero experience with nb people and characters, so, read how you will.  
> If you want to see more tell me. Give me ideas. I'm running a little dry.

The first time she sees Silver he comes sliding out of the galley depths behind her whilst she’s distracted by the talking parrot, so her first sight is actually of him in the light, with a stool in one hand, a knife in the other. She’s worked in an Inn, she knows to notice what people carry. 

“What do you want him to say, boy? Girl?” He’s just a subtly handsome cook, to all image, with a grimed apron and limp. When she introduces herself he holds her hand perhaps a beat too long – they’re at arm’s length, and she’s left lingering in the air when he drops her in a huff about being “particular”. He does not use her name.

“Keep it always handy,” he says gleefully, stabbing himself in the leg.

She’s horrified, too horrified for sensible words. “You’ve stabbed your leg!”

“Aye,” he agrees cheerfully, almost preening, “that I paid big doubloons for in Bristol.”

Oh, God! The one legged pirate – the one she was warned about – but he’s so, so, so handsome and nice and his voice – oh, Lord – in almost hysterical panic, she lunges for a knife, pointing it shakily at the man who’s been (conceptually) haunting her nightmares. To her surprise he brushes it off, humourous, not seeming to take a single thing seriously. It hurts, a little, but the same old dim hurt as always, the hurt of being nothing but a girl in a man’s world.

She admits that, no, she can’t really cook, but assures him that she can follow a recipe when given one – she faces away from him to avoid his eyes. 

“You read?”

“If people would let me. The Captain just snatched his maps straight out of my hand,” she bemoans, the phantom of rich inked parchment on her fingertips, the weight of bundled maps ghosting her hands.

“You read maps! You – ” and here, she muses bitterly, comes the sneering, a peasant girl who reads, how vile.   
“- smart as paint!”

What? 

Silver is awed, impressed. Metal leg clacking the boards, he moves to her, looming over. He calls her pretty, reluctantly, as if the word is torn from him without permission.

His sharp words, the crisp sounds he leaves in his wake, warms her belly in a way she’s never before experienced. Turning her back may not be wise but she needs to think, to be away from his eyes, to just – not be near him whilst she works this all out. No soup – no – but she’s looking at him, and he hands the ladle over with a firm order, and she’s been conditioned by Grandma to try the stew so many times that she simply hands the knife over. After all, if he wanted to harm her, he would have when she was turned. She’s a girl. Not a woman, not dangerous or smart of anything, not like the Doctor. 

It takes her only a few days to get comfortable around Silver, in the dark galley, the ship functioning and creaking and a huge glorious Inn around her – this is the most like home she’s felt, even though she misses Grandma and worries over treasure in her dreams (Silver haunts them, but not the bad ones, oh no, far worse for her than that). It brings a flush to her cheek when she dwells on it, on the way he is so tall (and hot, he runs so hot, why, when she is often cold, even down here) at her back when he needs to reach the shelves where she often works, on his scarred knuckles pressing his skin as he slices, on the swells of muscle she’s caught glimpses of. Back home, helping the Inn, she’s seen everything, almost, from the drunkest sot to the pickiest eaters. She, herself, isn’t scandalised when the galley heats and Silver opens his shirt. Flushed, perhaps. Doctor Livesey is scandalised on her behalf, when she isn’t distracted by the seasickness and the crew’s many ailments.

Jim endures a horribly awkward conversation with her about men, and – things. Never again. Never. It isn’t like she’s old enough for any of that (she is perhaps already 18, if the Doctor’s guess is correct, but she doesn’t feel like a grown-up, so she’s only 17 still. A young 17. She acts younger, some tell her, it’s unfitting. Jim doesn’t care about that any more than she cares about her boy’s name. Is Jemima really better? Really?) but she’s certainly not ready.

Anyway. Silver is so much more worldly and even somewhat piratical, even though she doesn’t think he’s a pirate any longer. He’s funny, sarcastic, biting, but gentle to her. So far he doesn’t seem to share that gentleness with anyone else. He’s the easiest of masters to serve, and he understands her, and more importantly, he understands the need to eat. Apparently, it’s related to not having had enough food as a child – maybe she’d be less scrawny if she’d eaten more, and her body is now making up for the lack. It isn’t important. He feeds her. Not even Grandma gave her enough to eat, because they never had the money.

Still. Still, though. One-legged man… her nightmares stand between them, invisible, unacknowledged, present.

“Jim?”  
“Yes?”  
“You believe in ghosts?”  
She has to think a moment, staring down at the bubbling water which reminds her so strongly of boiling water in the Inn as wind screamed and people suffered winter illness. “No.”  
He snorts softly. “You can drive away mine, then, with your sense.”

Jim has never in her life felt cramps like these. Oh, she’d had them, a late bloomer, but never before had it hit her like this – just her luck. Tucked in her blankets as close to the heat left in the stove as possible, she curls tighter, miserable. Her hips ache, her stomach, her muscles, everything from her breastbone to her thighs, really. Why? Why her? Why this? Good food, reliable lifestyle, feeling safe, said the Doctor. 

“Jim?” 

The creak of the door should have alerted her. Useless girl, now he knows she’s here. 

“Jim. What’s the matter?”

She says nothing, only curls tighter, and sobs at a sudden stabbing cramp, knotted in the blanket, hard wood below. Behind her are shuffling hop noises – Silver isn’t wearing the leg, that tapping must be as he moves his crutch. 

With a grunt he lowers himself to sit with her. “Here,” he rumbles, hand hot on her cheeks, “Drink. It can take a few minutes to take effect, but you’ll feel a lot better.” The concoction is strongly rum-based, she notes. 

“Silver? Thank you.”

There’s no response, but he rests his hand on her back, not reacting (not that she sees) when she shuffles his hand lower down her back to radiate heat closer to where she needs it to be. She falls into fitful sleep with her head pressed to his leg. 

(He too sleeps. He wakes first; she is pressed alongside him, head on his shoulder, his arm tucked around her to hold her close, and his leg is cramping, but she’s so pretty – her hair is down. It’s soft. After as many long minutes of simply being together as he can afford, he moves away, places her down gently to rest her head on a rolled cloth. It’s – well, he doesn’t let himself dwell. She’s quite a bit younger than he (is that a problem out here at sea?). He is after all a heartless pirate.)

(After that night, she’s not just the cabin girl. She’s his cabin girl. His.)

“You’re awake early.”  
“Late,” he corrects, staring blearily at the wall.   
“Do you need anything?”   
“Still believe ghosts don’t exist?”  
“Of course.”  
“Chase mine away, then.”  
She lingers, before fetching an old sea log from the Captain’s cabin (of an old old voyage, but an interesting one, and he’d lent it to her to read) and sitting at his feet and starting off. “Day one, 11th April, Belfast. Calm seas, brisk cold breeze…”

She broods over her thoughts of pirates over making dinner, an unexpected nightmare having hunted through her mind before dawn. Why had it returned? It’s been a long time since she last thought of Silver as a pirate. Too gentle, too kind to her, too unassuming, not even a particularly coarse accent. He doesn’t sound piratical in the slightest. Surprisingly softly spoken. A great cook. Honest, seemingly, as much as anyone was on this whole ship-Inn, with an uncanny knack for catching a lie.   
“What’s got you brooding over there?” he inquires, too chipper.   
She shrugs. “Life. Nightmares about pirates.”  
“Better in the daylight?”  
“I guess,” after only a slight hesitation. Wisely, he lets the matter drop.

The storm rages and it terrifies her. Silver has all day been restless (he’d pressed against her, he’s always so careful not to, he’d pressed her into the counter and she hadn’t gasped but she’d tensed a little because oh, oh all that muscle was so much harder on his bones than her own muscles were on hers) like a caged cat, breathing the salt air deep, letting the wind tear through the galley until she’d pleaded to close it for fear of ruining the food. Waves leap high as mountains.

Silver bids her come up, above deck, into the storm, and he sounds so alive out there, revelling in the power of nature, in the power he wields himself even one limb short. She obeys, not sure why she trusts his encouragement. 

The wind snatches at her, pressing her loose britches around her legs, but she doesn’t care that there’s a man out here and she’s soaking and a girl and that this is a million levels of improper. Everything is wild, free, alive. She understands the attraction it bears for Silver. Untamed. The storm clutching and grasping at the ship like some venomous sea-god. Towering waves crash and sweep and it’s terrifying, she is so afraid but also so exhilarated and she can’t stop the scream as the wind jars her into the rails and the water reaches for her –

Arms around her press her hard into a strong chest. Even in a crowd, she would know it to be Silver. He takes her into his arms, possessive, and firmly says, “No, Mister Storm. This girl is mine.”

The storm listens to him, she swears, even through the blind fear she knows she is now safer than she has ever been, because he has her, and she is his.

She doesn’t sleep that night; waking dreams of Silver drawing her against him haunt her. Her stomach fizzes when she thinks too hard about it.

He points out a light. Star, she says, but it is not, and the next isn’t a planet, and she pushes in her own names for the constellations because the others are just silly to her, she doesn’t know the tales, and now is not the time to ask Silver to teach them to her. He sits her down on the deck, his false leg stretched before them, so close his almost unnatural heat encases her gently. That night, he teaches her how to read the stars, to find North and the fixed star that never ever moves – like Grandma, unmoving, a centre-point of the universe. Polaris. North Star. The one constant, immovable star. She likes the taste of the stars on her tongue, the sound of them rolling off his. All the magic stories she doesn’t see. 

“We use all of this to find out where we are on the dark, empty sea.”

When she reaches out her measuring fist he pushes her thumb down with same ease as he moves her about the galley or corrects her hold on a musket. He teaches her, only slightly exasperated, what a sextant is and what latitude means, and this is what she’s always wanted, this is the belonging she craves. Unnoticed, she leans closer to him. 

“Each fist is ten degrees, right, and if it’s six fists then it must be,” he prompts her. 

“60°!” 

“Yes! And that is your latitude. That is where you are right how. Latitude 60°. And now you can find your way safe through all this evil world,” he stares absently out at the dark horizon, some thought capturing his attention. “Abracadabra.”

He stands, heads below deck, and she follows him down, lying in her bed gleeful at this new skill. 

The map! In a cask of apples! It’s unorthodox, but also so ingenious, and oh Doctor Livesay really is a clever lady. When she hears Silver approach, who can tell why she hides, beyond that the rest of the crew frighten her, and she wants to wait them out, so she can leap up and surprise Silver. Mostly she doesn’t want to share him.

He’s staging a mutiny, she realises as she listen to the voices she mostly recognises echo through the galley. Mutiny. Oh, Silver, oh her dear one-legged friend, with his “mathematics” and his unknown ghosts that she’s chased away by her reading – not so unknown, now that he calls on their dead captain who he murdered for treasure. Oh God. Oh, God. It makes her feel sick.   
Mathematics will never feel the same. 

He is poetry. Brutal poetry. Terrifying. And she is not quite heartbroken. Storming inside. She knows not how she feels. Oh, Silver. 

(He calls her ‘that cabin girl’, avoiding her name, knowing these reprobates are even more unworthy than he of holding it in their mouths, but all the while burns the hot possession of her. Always she will be his cabin girl. It is wrong to name her anything other. It will surely see them both dead if he does not. 

Somewhere on this journey, it became very important for Jim to receive her share. Last night, rebellion in his heart and mutiny under his tongue, the Mathematics held between his teeth, he dreamt of her. A castle for you, my girl. My girl.)

“We should leave!” 

“We’re almost there!”

The Doctor wants her to be kept safe but Jim is no child, no babe, no stranger to cruelty. A girl. Not pathetic. The Captain orders the disloyal crew to leave; the Squire almost turns it all over in his well-meaning feckless way. Jim argues for Silver to fill the last seat in the jolly-boat, stating his experience here as reason for candidacy, the words fallen from her lips before her sharp brain can filter the statement (accusation). 

“Now, how can you know that?”

For a second Jim feels her whole life teeter on an edge, like the storm is snatching her from the deck. “You told me.”

“No, I did not,” he slowly responds, dangerously, but she is still teetering, still ‘his cabin girl’, right up until she topples down over the edge when she saves the Squire by announcing that she herself holds the map. The fire in the pirate cook’s eyes tells her she’s almost certainly lost all favour he had for her. 

There is a long terrible minute where the parrot somehow has the map and won’t return to Silver, just lingers up in the rigging, so she climbs up after it.   
“Shoot the girl!” Silver gives the order; her heart cracks; the bullet roars out like thunder – she thinks she feels it pass her skin – she presses close to the deck – the bird is gone – she has the map. Stormed over, drained out, like a sick grey sky, she lies in the Nest and cries silently as the pirates leave and her nightmare one-legged man once again rears up between her and him. A nightmare – worse than any she’d dreamed up in the long months since Billy Bones – made real. 

(The crew is ridiculous. If he plays his hidden hand right he’ll get his cabin girl back and his treasure too, but he can’t let the smart Doctor live – she’s too good, too honest. Too fond of Jim. It will be a pleasure to kill the others. Her life he spares a second’s regret for, on Jim’s behalf. Never mind, no matter: Jim will be unsettled, easy to sway, easy to crumble until by his mere presence he will be the one she trusts in most. If that trust is merely a shard of what they’d built onboard, well, he’ll still win. He’s come too far to fail now.)

Jim staggers out of the surf, exhausted by repressed sorrow, anger, and exertion. Father’s breaches chafe her thighs something awful. Out of the shrubs comes a creature – dirt encrusted – yellow about the eyes – a man. A boy. 

“Ben Gunn,” he names himself. He’s also totally crackers. Off his rocker. 

“How do you know Long John Silver?” she demands, “You’re so scrawny – the cabin boy! The scrawny cabin boy!” All attempts to make him talk are lost to his filthy diseased brain, which he is aware enough to tell her he has, so she resorts to Grandma’s time-honoured method of bribery. 

Ben Gunn’s tale is sad, so similar to her own, a horrible outline of what lies ahead if she fails to stop and remove (subtract) the pirates. He’s so haunted by this tale of pirates and manipulation, shadowed by it as she fears she will be, and she swears as he tells her that he saw Flint shot by their so-called friend Silver, abandoned by him, cast away by their first friend. Between their one-and-a-half good friends, she is certain they can conquer their nightmare. 

“Just dive,” he says, hurling himself into the soil.

“Just, dive!” Like swimming, she thinks, screwing her eyes shut in numbed fear as she dives after her new true friend. 

Below ground is….weird. Creepy. Best not to think of it – although the tunnels are huge, some, and there’s many rooms been built, and some even seem to be double layered. For a moment she considers asking Ben if he knows which cave the treasure is in, so that they can sneak it onto the ship and then go back for her friends, but another hard look at the broken boy dissuades her. As God looks down in witness, he must only he one-and-twenty if he has a day. She can’t lose his trust; she can’t bear to let him down. 

(He almost loses all control of the situation, but has he not handled this before? If course he has. Diminish himself, big them up, then sink a knife into their backs. Cowardly, in some minds, but no, no, it is smart. It is how he has survived so long with such a disability. Thank his clever brains that he has a false if uncomfortable leg allowing him to manoeuver around the rugged little island. What is left of his crew is afraid again. Oh, how he has crafted himself.)

“JIM!” 

“DOCTOR!”

She’s never been so glad to see her old friend, holds tight to the grounding fabric of her waistcoat, breathes in the Doctor-smell, isn't even irritated by the Squire’s near-senseless ramblings. Ben provides an excellent distraction from untimely celebration, cowering from the “real captain, real muskets,” as he clings to her close to her leg like a little child after the Captain cuffs him for nipping. 

“You’ve brought us the bloody cabin boy of the bloody Walrus!”

Well, of course it sounds bad when he puts it that way, but the sharp Doctor finds the benefit Jim already knew to mind, setting to thinking of how Ben’s unique knowledge of the tunnels will be utilised to help them. The Squire’s grip of helpful intelligence lasts literally minutes, his insistence of flag raising bringing death and discovery upon them, the death of his plough-woman, and worse than all this, Silver’s attentions, his claims of being a gentleman, that creepy parrot on his hand – the death of the Captain.  
She’s so sick to death of being afraid. Grown-ups, they never seem to act fast enough, to busy arguing and bemoaning and getting distracted. Ben has run away; she follows his example, heading through the dark for her ship. 

Hispañola is a hard home to keep, the drag up the anchor chain agonising and blistering, but Jim feels more at home than ever before. The only crewman left is Israel Hands, who speaks seemingly no English, but insists upon lighting a match and – 

The explosion rattles Jim’s very bones but the ship is intact, and now the hard task: sail the ship around the island single-handedly without turning into Ben Gunn. Saucepan, Grandma Polaris, count, and Jim is at 40°. Next to find is the wind, favourable, and so she sets to work, hauling whole-body-weight on the rigging ropes to force the ship around, thanking all the lessons she learned from the scoundrels of the ship. Captain Hawkins has a good ring to it! 

“Doctor Livesay, wake, wake up,” she shakes at the red-tint shape, which unfolds itself into Silver, her false false friend. 

“The Doctor said, as for that girl, confound her! Kill her! Drown her, Silver, I don’t much care,” he lies, he must certainly be lying, but her friends are missing and the map is in his hands and there is nothing left to believe in except the treasure somewhere on this island. He bids her read, and this is a most peculiar sense of belonging, this application of her sharp paint-smart mind to unravelling the clues riddled on the parchment in her hands. 

The ribs, spots, lingering, and then the moonlight to the whalebone, the pirates pressing around her as she reads. Calling Flint’s clues obscure would be generously understating the matter. Ghosts walk about Silver’s mind – she sees them shadowing his eyes – ignores them, for he has lost what loyalty he deserved from her. It is the mad broken pirate Joan Goat who finds the trapdoor down into the tunnels, the ragtag gaggle descending right behind her. Jim is still floating on the delight of having solved the map when her ex-best-friend beckons her.

“You’re my cabin girl, aren’t ya?” he cajoles, placing the probably-loaded musket into her hands, “See how I trust you with my life,” with his arms spread. If she so wanted she could kill him. If she dared. If she dared, and could bear the agony, she would do it: she should, should, should, but even the thought is like shooting herself in the heart. 

“We let these worms wriggle and burrow, as soon as we see them start up the ladder with the loot, you and me, we puts a pistol bullet in each of their brains! Two shares is greater than seven. It adds up, don’t it?”

“Yes, it,” and he steals the rest of the words from her mouth with a kiss pressed to her lips, brief, only a few heartbeats long, but she is stunned into silence. He rants out all they could have, all she could have, calling her his girl, and her bruised heart sinks. Sinks. Jim Hawkins is no pirate and no pirate’s woman. She knows what she must do.

“I tell you, I’m arresting you,” she insists, holding the gun over them, voice wobbling as she does so, eyes fixed on Silver’s. The bird flaps up to her face; in a desperate effort to stay on the ladder the pistol falls from her hands into Silver’s. 

“Who steals my treasure?” rasps a voice, the ghost that walks in Silver’s mind. Despite herself, she is afraid: his fear startles up her own, as the ghost winds a spell over them all, until it slips up and names Unlucky Micky. Jim’s heart sinks through her stomach. 

“Ben Gunn!” The ghost-boy holds their attention, letting them think him an apparition, leads them away down through the tunnels. 

“It doesn’t like being hit. The island is like Captain Flint’s sea chest. The treasure isn’t in the bottom,” Ben tells them, eyes on his ghosts, and she hears Silver yell for the treasure hears the roof rumble, hears the roof tumble and crash and fall in and they scream in there and so does she inside because oh God oh God oh, oh,

“Long John!” Jim throws herself at the roof-fall, impassable, soul agonised, “Silver!”

Silence. 

Nothing but silence in answer to her plea. He’s left her, left her for treasure, lost to her now forever.   
The Squire and the Doctor get carried away; she has no patience left ans snaps that she has the ship safe and ready for them to sail away. Everyone's pockets are filled with as much as they can carry; Ben sneaks a small chest over to Jim which they stuff as full with gold as the ragged remnants of Ben Gunn’s life allow. They’ll share what’s in their stashes between them two and Grandma. 

It’s three whole days before the grief hits Jim like a boot to the stomach and she can’t breathe or think or move, just curls into a ball in the dark of the empty practically unused galley and chokes her tears. Who can say how long she lies there where she once slept beside Silver? Ben is the only company she can bear: he tucks a blanket around her. It smells of Silver’s little used spicy scent. Jim coils tighter into herself, the grief hollowing her bones, no air in her lungs, no voice to give words to the grief except endless keening.

“Grandma!” 

“Jim! My Jemima,” greets Grandma joyfully. Her eyes catch on Ben as she releases Jim from the tight embrace, and she demands, “What is that?”  
They have tried to clean him, but he is still bone-thin and ragged, yellow earth-paint stains about his eyes making him look like a ghost on foot. Grandma demands they share their tale; gold stashed, they do, talking long into the night, falling asleep where they sit, Ben curled at Jim’s feet like a loyal dog. He whimpers in his slumber, starting awake at the slightest sound, muffling cries once near dawn but they leave him be. Three years lived below ground have left their prints on his psyche, which they have all noticed whilst on board the ship. When frightened Ben hides; he still refers to himself in the third person; he still carries out entire arguments and conversations with himself. He is fondest of Jim. It quickly becomes apparent he also likes Grandma – but who doesn’t?

(He calls her darling, letting the words tip out from his mouth to win her over. At the least, he wants her to help him get the treasure and get the ship moving again. Not back to England – one of the Portuguese settlements maybe – he can work that out once they’re back on the Hispañola. When he kisses her he realises this is but a dream for she kisses him back, his darling girl, and the dream stretches, until he awakes all at once, lips tingling with ghost-kisses, nothing but the gulls for company and blue skies above. The island is his doom. It is a miracle he wasn’t killed in the rock-fall down below – a miracle indeed that he’d stayed closest to the door out of any of them. In his nightmares of compressed earth Jim screams out for him in terror, but he cannot reach, and when he does there is nothing in his grasp but ghosts.)

The New Admiral Inn is dark, getting colder as night draws in even in the growing spring, a stiff breeze rattling the sign hanging over the big window. Jim is sitting on the table closest to the bar, warm in her new dark woollen waistcoat and matching skirt, reflecting the story she tells regularly; the snippets she leaves out, the secrets she holds close and warm in her chest. Silver’s teaching. His eyes, voice, arms in the storm, his humouring of her star-naming. All this is hers alone. To speak the precious painful memories into her new home would be to diminish their little remaining value.

Rap, rap, rap on the heavy main door. “I’m shut up for the night, no more food,” she calls out.

“I need shelter, please,” rasps a man’s voice. She casts her eyes from door to shuttered window to her account books; she cannot afford to turn away custom.

“Alright,” she agrees tiredly, “I’m coming.” Through the growing wind tumbles a tallish man in a heavy coat, a bag clutched tight against him, and she thinks no more on it as she bids him sit – what’s it to her that his hood is over his face? She’s a damned good shot, these days, with nothing left to fear from thieves and muggers. No delay is needed. Food, water, a bed and key, the rates. “Five for the night, with this.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll carry it up to your room.”

“Ah,” he wavers as Jim turns away, “I struggle awful with my bad knee, see, and the rain sets into it something awful.”

Sighing, she asks if he can handle stairs at all, not looking back at him – after all, if he’s covering his face she probably doesn’t actually want to see it – then assures him he can have the room nearest to the stairs, and that he won’t need to traverse them much, and she can carry anything necessary to allow him focus. Reluctantly, he agrees, traipsing behind her, gasping as he clutches at the handrail. Good job she thought to have them installed. 

“This one,” she says curtly, “Tell me by noon tomorrow if you need another night.”

“Thank you,” he murmurs, sitting heavily on the bed.  
She doesn’t reply, merely walks away to finish her books. This new guest’s arrival has disturbed her nostalgia for the old days of Grandma and her, when her only job was to keep on top of the registers and wait tables and prepare to take over the Inn in some far distant day when Grandma was gone. But she’s here now, in her own new place, with a collection of loyal guests, with people who never question her name and her dress and the way she prefers the near-shapeless men’s clothes and heavy skirts in her wardrobe to the much more fashionable dresses of her girl-friends in the town. A small stack of letters also need a response, letters from solicitor and Doctor Livesay and local businessmen wanting her to come tell her stories for them to draw in a crowd. Doctor Livesay would like to come visit at the end of the month; Jim’s reply is an eager acceptance. The solicitor has agreed to insure the Inn; Jim makes a note in the ledgers to set that money aside next trip into town. The Bendt sisters want her to attend a soiree in a sennight; Jim smiles as she agrees. The next letter blurs before her eyes; Jim puts everything in the safe under her bed and sleeps.   
Dreams of the storm on the Hispañola and Silver’s claiming of her from the storm wake her shortly after dawn, thin clouds scudding across weak yellow sky. 

The breakers echo in her ears. One of those days, then.

(His girl is no girl now but a woman grown – her hair longer but still in a thin braid over one shoulder, three hooped earrings giving her the barest look of a pirate. Hadn’t he promised her a castle? Hens? A cottage for her grandmother? The treasure failed them both, but by a miracle he is still alive, and he’s found her – serendipity is a funny thing. A warm bed he’d been wanting, and now he stares after her as she fetches his food, and represses thoughts of what other warm bed he could be in if he hadn’t mucked up so badly. At least his new leg hides him a little.

When she re-enters, the candles make her eyes glimmer, shadows dancing over her face where they didn’t used to trace, and he wonders how much he’s missed. She wears no ring. Is she still his?)


End file.
